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The religious currents of the age of the Severi did not escape the notice, or fail to engage the interest, of the Court. Julia Domna, Julia Mamaea, Alexander Severus, were all under the influence of the spirit of the time. These were the days in which Julia Domna and Philostratus discovered for the world a new saviour in the person of Apollonius of Tyana. But the religious zeal of Elagabalus was more passionate than the intellectual interest of any of his house. He conceived a universal religion for the Empire, and his abortive attempt to establish it is examined by Mr. Hay with a full sense of its significance and an unprejudiced desire to understand it.

With all his unashamed enthusiasm, Elagabalus was not the man to establish a religion; he had not the qualities of a Constantine or yet of a Julian; and his enterprise would perhaps have met with little success even if his authority had not been annulled by his idiosyncrasies. The Invincible Sun, if he was to be worshipped as a sun of righteousness, was not happily recommended by the acts of his Invincible Priest. I have said “idiosyncrasies”; should I not have said “infamies”? But it is unprofitable as well as unscientific simply to brand Elagabalus as an abominable wretch. His life is a document in which there is something demanding to be comprehended. If all men and women are really bisexual, this Syrian boy was of that abnormal type in which the recessive is inordinately strong at the expense of the dominant sex; he was a remarkable example of psychopathia sexualis; but in his age there were no Krafft-Ebings to submit his case to scientific observation. From this point of view, which Mr. Hay has taken, Elagabalus becomes an intelligible morbid human being. And the young man, though so highly abnormal and spoiled by the possession of supreme power before he had reached maturity, was far from being repulsive. A salient feature of his character was good nature; he appears to have wished to make every one happy. His pleasures were not stained by the cruelties of Nero. It amused him to shock people, but he was always good-humoured. He is said to have genially inquired of some grave and decorous old gentlemen who were his guests at a vintage festival, whether they were inclined for the pleasures of Venus. The anecdote, if not true to fact, seems to be characteristic. It is told in the chronique scandaleuse of Lampridius, one of the writers of that Augustan History round which a forest of critical literature has grown up in recent times. The outcome of all the criticism is generally to the discredit of these authors, and Mr. Hay has the merit of having strictly applied this unfavourable result to the Life of Elagabalus.